Old DSSG Blog Post – Normal life?

I’m happy to say that things seem to have finally settled back into a routine for me after the holidays. Christmas is always a LOT of fun, but it messes up my schedule.

Being off work for days on end (about 12 days total for me over the holidays) is nice and all, but it only means that all that work is waiting for me when I get back. More so this year, since our first big event of 2006 was out in California on January 12. Not enough time to get all your backed-up work done when you have a conference hanging over your head, so things I normally do at the beginning of the year (updating our website for the new year, cleaning out my desk, putting files in storage…) was pushed off.

Luckily, this past week was great for that kind of thing since our Internet connection was out at work Wednesday-Friday. Can you imagine three full days without internet in an office in this day and age? We have a backup dial-up connection, enough to download and send email, but it basically ground my normal work to a halt. XO Communications has said they won’t have our business DSL connection up again until someday Monday, so that could potentially mean four full business days of no internet! I’ll be shopping for a new provider at some point next week, I think.

So how was Christmas? Well, it was great as always. I love hanging out with the in-laws, just taking it easy, playing games, and chatting it up. My father in-law has been on a kick these last few years where he has made a game for us “kids” (my husband, his three siblings, and me) to play each Christmas. This year, he outdid himself!!

We began by reading the rules – four single-spaced pages of instructions and rules. Basically, the game consisted of about 12 rounds of competitions, with each player receiving poker chips in different denominations as prizes, depending on your placement within the round. The rounds of competition included
timed laying of a 100-pieces puzzle, timed solving of a Sudoku puzzle, competition in computer bowling, air gun target shooting, a mini-electronic skeeball competition, a nerf-basketball competition, a round of Yahtzee, getting the best one-coin PacMan score, and a couple of other things that I can’t recall.

There were yellow balls awarded as prizes, plastic dragons that you could use to trade yellow balls for other players’ chips, and many other ways to get your chip count high. Then we used our chips to get bingo boards, and the final competition was to get to Bingo! Ducky won, much to the chagrin of his younger brother… I think the whole thing took about 18 hours over 2 days… Lots of fun, though!!!

We also had fun on Christmas Eve, playing with the present we gave early to my father-in-law – a Kanakadea Atlatl and some spears. An Atlatl is a spear thrower, which acts as a fulcrum for your arm and allows you to throw much further and harder than you would otherwise. We spent several hours in the field behind their subdivision, taking turns throwing it. Some random guy happened to bike by, but had to stop and watch for a while. We finally talked him into trying it, which was funny. Not what he had been thinking he would do that day, for sure. I swear you can throw about three times the distance of a normal throw with that thing! Now I have to get a pretty one for myself…

Otherwise not much to say or “reflect” on.. I’m glad to be back to playing in CAL with the PS guys, particularly since we are now playing and not just getting forfeits. We will do better once we start playing together more, too. Thanks to Render’s prodding, I’ve also updated our website finally. If we can just try not to get hacked again, that would be good…

I’ll close with a few fun links.
I have been solving the two intelligece tests that have made the rounds lately. The first one is easier, while the second one is a bit harder. They are fun to solve, though my cultural bias is making some of them kinda of tough. The British-culture ones are particularly hard.

I also like the new ways to use Flickr. It’s fun to see how others think and tag at fastr, and fun to try out some art for yourself at retrievr, where you search for (a limited set of flickr photos) by drawing what you are looking for. It’s mostly color based, but still cool.

The Fabulist site I found this week is kind of fun. Kinda girly, maybe, but still has some great links. I’ve also been listening pretty much constantly to P3 Svea, which is the “young, Swedish music” channel from Swedish Radio channel 3. Some of the Swedish music is fun. The depth of styles is cool, with lots of immigrant-inspired music, plus some very hip-hop-ey but pop type stuff. I have one song stuck in my head (driving me crazy!). It’s not really my style of music. I think it’s in my head more because the bass line is very nice, and the “selfish, narcissistic, psycho, freaking bootlicking Nazi pimp” line makes me smile.Listen to Robyn’s “Handle me” here.